A Scientific Method
by thefoxandtherose
Summary: A lot can happen in a year - especially when time is slowing down.
1. Chapter 1

The thing you had to understand, the reason it had taken so long for him to realize what he'd been doing, was that the whole town was just too damn _weird_. It all seemed really clear in retrospect – okay, not ALL of it, but there was at least some semblance of a narrative - but when you first arrived, no matter how scientific your mind, no matter how obsessively and how actively you were cataloging and cross referencing and back checking, there was just too much _weird_, too much setting and resetting and readjusting of your constraints, for you to trust any of the patterns that emerged.

He was a scientist, first and foremost, and scientists have a method. Observation, hypothesis, experimentation, data, analysis. Patterns. There was a rhythm to it, a beautiful sort of flow - when you studied something, when you could understand it, when you could draw the elaborate and beautiful patterns of its behavior, then you could truly know it.

Carlos found himself desperately looking for constants – for control groups – but every time he thought he had one pinned down it would teleport, or melt, or develop an unnaturally strong gravitational pull. It made it virtually impossible to do his job. Every bit of data he collected on Night Vale knotted itself into a snarl of fishing wire; every pattern he found twisted in on itself, threw out flurries of interference and buried itself deep inside a Matryoshka doll of outliers and static.

It was frustrating beyond anything he'd experienced before.

And he couldn't seem to get enough of it.


	2. Chapter 2

He had been so EXCITED when he'd first arrived, too.

Granted, the details of how exactly he came to be in Night Vale were a bit unclear. He remembered uncovering the magnetic anomalies of the area in some of his research earlier in the year, and then - there had been some kind of nomination process, he was sure. Probably funded by the university. Not that he didn't remember, he knew he remembered. He could tell you if he thought about it. But it hardly seemed important just now. Beside the point.

Anyway, he knew for certain he'd been awarded some kind of grant. And that he was happy about it.

How could he not be? He was like a kid in a proverbial candy shop. The most scientifically interesting city in America. He forgot who'd told him that. He'd always had a fascination with the unexplained, a love of the scientific method that amounted to reverence. Add to that an uncanny ability to focus his curiosity in a way that bordered on the obsessive and you had a formula that had driven him to the top of his class, all the way from elementary school through post-graduate work, much to the despair of his more ambitious classmates and colleagues. Carlos had always been too absorbed in his work to notice his rankings, which naturally raised the ire of those who viewed him as their primary competition. Nothing angers a competitive academic more than being beaten out by somebody who is oblivious to the fact that academia is a competition.

And now, here he was. Embarking on the single most fascinating project of his career. He double-checked the address and stepped out of the chill of his air conditioned hybrid and onto the scorched and dusty pavement of the parking lot of his new lab; the glaring mid-morning sun made him sneeze. He shielded his eyes to the brightness, and stood for a moment, soaking it all in. Then he gathered up the limited possessions he'd carried with him, and went to unlock the lab.

...

Here in Night Vale, the scientific community seemed – different than his usual university group. He met up with the other scientists for lunch at the local Pizza shop next to his new lab soon after he arrived. There hadn't been any of the obligatory mutual admiration expected upon the meeting of scientists who were top in their respective fields, for which Carlos had been grateful, but he couldn't help but notice that the team seemed unusually grave. And twitchy. They debriefed him in hushed tones about the work they'd been doing, which seemed to amount to collecting huge quantities of data on a variety of bizarre local phenomena, which they had then proceeded to pile up in different places – glass cases full of soil samples, bone samples, piles of surveys, photographs, hard drives - and then never actually managed to analyze. When the data itself had started to behave abnormally – catching fire, or alphabetizing itself, or developing a mucous membrane, they had started collecting data on the data's behavior, and it had become something of a vicious cycle. Carlos thought it sounded like they weren't making any actual progress at all, but he didn't want to say that, especially not so soon after meeting them all, so he mostly nodded and made "Hmmm"-ing sounds.

They'd been the ones to recommend the impromptu – and immediate – town meeting. They told him it was important – that he needed to introduce himself, to let them "get a good look, check you out."

"They need to see you're not afraid." They'd said. "You're not afraid, are you? Good….good. They can smell it on you."

Carlos wasn't afraid.

Carlos was already thinking about the earthquakes they couldn't feel, and the lights they couldn't explain, and wondering what additional modifications he'd need to make to the equipment in his lab if he wanted to analyze the data they'd been collecting on the data they'd collected.

Carlos was setting his watch for sunset.

...

The turnout for the meeting hadn't been that great, but he was impressed they got anyone to come on such short notice. Carlos stared out at the little group, most of whom were chewing on corn muffins, eyeing him with a mix of interest, suspicion, and something that Carlos couldn't place which might have been concern. There was an old woman, bundled up in a shawl, smiling vaguely at him, with empty seats at either side of her, at which she occasionally whispered; a dark haired woman with a sour expression in a business suit that must have been incredibly uncomfortable in the mid-day heat; and a neatly dressed man with the hungry and suspicious look of a reporter, who was muttering into a handheld tape recorder that looked like it had come straight out of 1995. A few men in dark suits stood off to one side – but if they were trying to look intimidating, the effect was ruined by the corn muffins.

Carlos stood, greeted the crowd, introduced himself. Night Vale, he explained to them, was a location of incredible scientific importance. It was, by his estimation, the most scientifically interesting community in the US, and yet very little scientific literature existed documenting the studies that had been done there. Actually, nothing had been published on Night Vale's unique scientific standing. Not yet."

"I'd like to fix that." He said. "There is so much that we stand to learn from studying the various physical, temporal, and geological anomalies of this area. There is a wealth of untapped potential information available here that cannot be obtained anywhere else, information that could substantially change our understanding of the natural world. Any scientist could easily spend a lifetime studying Night Vale. "

The man with the tape recorder was squinting at him, scrutinizing, and Carlos couldn't tell whether it was with hatred or admiration or confusion.

"Basically, I've come to study just what's going on around here" he said. He liked how the words felt in his mouth. They has such a ring of authority, of adventure, and as he looked out into the sea of faces, he felt a sudden rush of confidence. He _was_ going to get to the bottom of this place. He beamed out at them, grinning broadly.

The men in the suits scowled.

The man with the tape recorder looked thunderstruck.

The old woman applauded.

Carlos stuck around after the meeting for a while, shaking hands and answering questions. The little old woman – she had been the one who brought the corn muffins, it turned out – had made him bend halfway to the floor so that she could get a good look at him, and had then reached out and patted his cheek, and told him that the angels would be keeping an eye on him. It was something his own gran had always told him, although it hadn't seemed quite as ominous coming from her back then, and Carlos had said he appreciated it, and she had smiled and tottered off.

The last one to leave was the reporter. He had been standing back, watching Carlos as intensely as he could without looking like he was watching him intensely. But Carlos had felt his eyes on him.

"Welcome to Night Vale," the reporter said, putting out his hand, and he was smiling. It was a nice smile. Carlos shook his hand, smiled back. "I was hoping I could ask you a few questions, get a few updates for the local radio? I'm Cecil, by the way." He added quickly, "I should have said that first….."

"Thank you, Cecil." Carlos said* -Cecil made a small, high pitched noise in the back of his throat that sounded a bit like "Nnngh!" - "…and sure, what do you want to know?"

Cecil looked a bit surprised to be asked. "Oh, um…well, I think the listeners would like to more about what you've found so far, maybe?" he smiled "Specifically, why we're so special? Scientifically, I mean?"

"Hmm. Well, of course you already know about the earthquakes…" Cecil cocked his head to one side a bit, looking confused. It reminded Carlos of a puppy. "No?" Cecil shook his head, and Carlos frowned. "Have the other scientists not been providing updates on this?"

"Not for a while, no….it's been, what, six months since we had an on-air update? None of them seem to want to visit the studio. Or call in. Or communicate with us at all, actually."

He glanced over at the other scientists, who were watching him, wide-eyed, and shaking their heads. Ugh. Carlos saw no point in that petty academic pride that drove people to conceal their work from their colleagues, or from the public. Cecil was right – the people of Night Vale ought to know what was going on.

"We should fix that," he said seriously, and Cecil was beaming at him like Christmas had come early. He hadn't expected to find somebody so interested in his work, let alone somebody who wanted to get the word out to the community about it – it was an amazing stroke of luck. "So yes, we've been monitoring the seismological activity from the station out by route 800, and there seem to be massive earthquakes occurring in Night Vale that – and this is the weird part, obviously – nobody can feel. We've checked the equipment several times, it's all working properly. So that's the first thing we're investigating. There's also some questions about radiation levels…but maybe don't report that yet, the readings aren't final and I think that data may be skewed. And we're going to investigate a new housing complex later today that we've been getting some strange readings from…maybe…"

Carlos hesitated, feeling suddenly nervous, and then feeling a bit stupid for feeling nervous. This was part of his job.

"Maybe…if you're interested, I could call the station later with an update on that…if you wanted…"

Cecil stared at him blankly for a second. "Yes!" he said suddenly, a bit too loudly, "Yes, that would be…that would be great!" He started scrambling in his messenger bag for something, and Carlos pulled out a pen, ready to write down the number.

Cecil turned, smiling, business card in hand, but his face went pale when he saw the pen. His eyes darted back to the suited figures in the back of the room, and back to Carlos.

"Um, Carlos, is that…is that a pen?" Cecil said, whispering the last word. Carlos raised an eyebrow at him. "There's a city ordinance" he continued, keeping his voice low, "you're not allowed...maybe I should…" he reached out, taking the pen from Carlos's hand gently, as if it might explode. "There. Don't worry, I'll get rid of this for you." He eyed the suited figures sternly, his gaze fixated on them as he said, rather more loudly than necessary, "You're new here. There's a 10 day grace period under statute 15 of the City Council's founding ordinances" he looked back at Carlos, a bit chastisingly "but you're really not supposed to have these here."

"But… What? Really, no pens?"

"No." he said, deadly serious, "Or margarita glasses, either, just so you know. Actually…." Cecil looked suddenly worried, but he forced a laugh "You know, Night Vale can be a bit tricky for newcomers. Like any new, scientifically interesting city - there's a lot to learn!" He added cheerfully. "Here, why don't I give you my personal number, too…" he flipped the business card he'd pulled out of his bag over, and pulling a lump of something dark out of his pocket, scratched 10 digits into the back of it. "If you have any questions, you can call me _anytime_." He looked up at Carlos, earnestly, "Seriously, ANY. TIME. I'm always available. Always."

"Oh. Um…thanks." Carlos said. No pens? Really? The other scientists had said the city legal situation was weird but that seemed a bit much…"Thank you, I will."

Cecil made another one of those high pitched noises, but he looked pleased. "Oh!" he said suddenly, flushing a bit, "Oh, and, you should listen to the show! It would be a great way to get more information about what's going on in town – we put a lot of work into it. We make it as informative as possible! It's a point of pride."

Carlos said he would, and Cecil had continued beaming at him, until after a few moments, Carlos had coughed, and said he'd probably get back to the other scientists, and Cecil had spluttered an apology for keeping him, reminded him he could call for ANY. REASON. and left.

He watched Cecil leave, saw him slip the pen into the trash can as he walked out, flexing his fingers as if it had burned him.

Carlos laughed. The guy was definitely weird, he thought. But then… Carlos had a bit of a soft spot for weird. And he seemed….sweet. And genuinely interested in helping out. And it couldn't hurt to make friends with the locals, right?

A few minutes after he left, Carlos pulled out his cell phone, and typed in the 10 digits scrawled on the back of the card. "This is Carlos, the scientist." He texted. "This is my personal number. Just so you have it, in case something comes up."

...

A scientist learns to be a skeptic. That means, if you're smart, checking, double checking, and obsessively triple checking everything from your instruments to your calculations to validate any unexpected results **before** you get overexcited and alert the local news media. Even if that media was just a local community radio show.

Carlos was a professional. He'd seen what happened with the guys at OPERA and that whole faster than light neutrino fiasco. So it was several hours before he was ready to accept that the most reasonable hypothesis they had to go on was that the house…just didn't exist.

"It _seems_ like it exists." He explained to the Night Vale Community Radio studio intern when he called to deliver the promised update. "Like it's just right there when you look at it, but we've run over 15 different diagnostics, testing for the expected background radiations, photoelectric effect, that sort of thing, and we've determined…"

"Uh huh." said the intern. "I'm going to need you to slow down a sec, and make sure you're using terms our audience will understand. I'm supposed to get this ready to read off as a live update I need to refill my cocktail straw…"

Carlos thought it best to just let that last bit slide for now. "Oh, really? You're going to report it today?"

"Yeah, I've been waiting for your call," she said, sounding a bit put out, "I was told this was important breaking news, right?"

"Um….yeah. Yeah, it is." He said. It probably wasn't, considering the other data they had been collecting, but he didn't want her to feel like he she was wasting her time.

"Okay." She said again, "let's take this from the top."

...

The sun was setting over Radon Canyon.

It was setting late.

Carlos had checked his watch, and confirmed the time with another scientist, and it was at least 10 minutes late. Which was interesting, and concerning, and a little exiting - but he was going to have to start compartmentalizing anomalies if he wanted to get anywhere researching this town, Carlos thought, because they were not measuring time right now.

They were measuring radiation. And, it seemed, they were measuring a LOT of it.

This was surprising for two reasons. First, neither the quantities nor the types of radiation were what they had expected. Generally, when you have an enormous lead door in an abandoned canyon that claims to be protecting you from massive amounts of decaying plutonium, you'd expect a large amount of the "plutonium is decaying here" type of radiation. And you'd expect it to be coming from the general vicinity of the door.

Their results weren't showing that. There was a large amount of thermal radiation, some kind of eerie green photoelectric effect, and some deep melodic humming, but basically no gamma radiation - at least not coming from the door.

That was the second surprising thing. Their equipment was picking up an alarming level of what seemed to be gamma radiation coming from the town itself - radiation which either hadn't been there or for some reason hadn't been detectable a few hours earlier.

The other scientists were discussing possible sources – terrestrial gamma ray flashes from lightning being the popular choice, in spite of the fact that they were several thousand feet too low and there weren't any lightning storms.

Several thousand feet too low, and far, far too close to the town. Carlos's feet crunched across the grit and gravel of the canyon as he stalked over to the pile of equipment, grabbed one of the few handheld devices they had, and trotted back to his car, speeding up as he got closer.

He turned the key in the ignition, holding the Geiger counter out the window in one hand and the steering wheel in the other. He had only been here one day, and he'd be damned if some misplaced lightning storm, or whatever, was going to decimate the population of his new town before he even had a chance to collect any decent data on it.**

He snaked back towards the town, the quickly cooling desert air whipping at him through the open window, letting the frequency of the popping Geiger counter guide him. There was a steady increase in the frequency, which meant whatever is was, it was centralized. And if he can just get to the source…he swerved violently as he turned a corner and saw tall, shadowy figures with their arms raised around a bonfire in the middle of the street, and detoured around Oxford street…if he could just find the source then maybe he could stop it.

Carlos came to stop in front of the Night Vale Community Radio building, the Geiger counter popping out a steady pace in his hand, like a tinny, high pitched heartbeat. Carlos felt his stomach go cold. He got out, slammed the car door, and ran across the parking lot.

...

"Wait – I'm sorry, Mr. Scientist, but you can't…"

Carlos pushed through the door to the recording booth, watching his hand anxiously as the Geiger counter continued to pick up the pace. He shouldn't be able to stand, with this level of radiation – none of them should. They shouldn't be there. Was it the adrenaline, keeping him moving? Or sheer force of will?

"Oh…Carlos, hi!"

He looked up for the first time to see Cecil pulling down his headphones. He was flushing, but smiling, an open, genuine sort of smile that clearly said "I have no idea why you're here but I am both very confused and very pleased." He refocused on the machine in his hand, which was, in the language of technology, flipping the hell out.

"We – um – well we got your update about the house. No response yet from the listeners, but I think…." He heard Cecil's voice trail off "Oh, are you doing science right now? Sorry I just…what are you looking for? If there's something I can do to help…"

The Geiger counter, much to his dismay, was leading him directly over to the chair where Cecil sat, still smiling politely but looking slightly concerned as well.

"Um just…." Radiation is a trigger word for people, Carlos, don't say radiation, "I'm just scanning. For…materials…"

"Oh," said Cecil, "Oh, alright."

They needed to run, Carlos thought, at this level of radiation, he should drop the counter and run.

He took another step forward, and the Geiger counter started to hiss and sing.

Another step, and he was between Cecil and the microphone. Cecil was looking back and forth between Carlos and the counter, a mild but interested look on his face, as if he were waiting patiently for Carlos to explain what he was doing.

He placed the counter next to the microphone, and it went insane.

Carlos nearly dropped it in shock as it began to harmonize with itself in a chorus of angry, shrill chirps, backed by a loud hissing, and became hot in his hand.

"Wow!" Cecil said smiling. "It really likes the microphone!"

Carlos took a step backwards, eyes still fixated on the counter.

"Cecil, you need to evacuate. This whole building, everyone needs to ….we need to go. Now."

Cecil laughed. "What? Go where? Carlos, we're in the middle of the show!"

"I'm serious, Cecil, this is incredibly dangerous. The damage is probably already done…"

"Oh…I'm sorry, but I can't" he said, as if he were turning down a dinner invitation he'd really have liked to accept, "I really have to finish up. It won't be much longer, maybe after I wrap up we could…"

"I'm not kidding, Cecil, seriously we need to run!" Carlos said, suddenly snapping, but his legs were locked, torn between an impulsive panic reflex to bolt and an inability to leave another human being so obviously in mortal peril. He reached out and grabbed Cecil's shoulder, to shake him out of it or to pull him from the chair, but suddenly there was a loud thrashing from outside the booth, and a shrieking, and when he looked back at Cecil…

Cecil was smiling. Far, far too broadly. His eyes were too reflective, like old incandescent bulbs, and he seemed to flicker violently under Carlos's hand, as if by touching him, Carlos had somehow knocked him out of tune.

When he spoke through his too wide smile, his voice was too deep, and too slow, and too clogged with static to be human.

"But, if I leave, Dear Carlos," he said, "who would finish the show?"

Carlos's felt his heart drop out of him, and he turned, and let go, and ran.

...

*Carlos was horrible with names. He had seen a study once that repeating a person's name when you first met them helped you to remember it, and since then he'd made a concerted effort.

**You don't end up top in your field, investigating a place like Night Vale, by being the kind of person who runs AWAY from the fire.


	3. Chapter 3

Aside from the weekly lunches his team organized to get pizza next door, and one unpleasant but necessary trip to get his haircut (the desert was hot and it was becoming a nuisance) Carlos didn't really leave the lab for the next few weeks.

He was processing the data he'd collected, and frankly, he still had a lot of compartmentalizing to do.

For example - he had taken his memories of his first evening in Night Vale, put them neatly into a special folder in his mind, and had clearly labeled it as something that he would Deal With Later. He didn't have an acceptable answer for why they hadn't all died of radiation poisoning that night. He couldn't explain why his equipment had stopped registering the radiation shortly after he'd left the building, and he couldn't explain why, driving away from Night Vale at breakneck speeds, he had repeatedly found himself coming to a halt in front of his new lab.

He couldn't explain what he'd seen reflected in the flickering form of the radio host, as the Geiger counter had screamed in the background – and he really, really didn't want to think about it.

He mentally added a warning sign to the file, and added some police tape for good measure. He needed to get his bearings here, in this bizarre town, and until he knew what he was dealing with, he needed to avoid blatantly exposing himself to imminent danger – and that meant staying far, far away from the Night Vale Community Radio Station, and from its host.

Carlos sighed, tucked away the strictly metaphorical mental file, and refocused himself on the first, most manageable seeming challenge – how to get some accurate readings out of Radon Canyon.

...

After a few weeks of doing measurements, Carlos had learned that there were two types of technology that worked in night vale. The first was old technology – mechanical things, and analog devices – like tape recorders, or mechanical clocks, or Cecil's equipment at the radio station. The second was very, very old technology – ritualistic sacrifices, and things bordering on dark magic – like the protective charms sealing the entrance to the library, or the Bloodstone circles, or their cell phones.

It made sense to him now why everyone's radio's looked like props from an old Hollywood set, why Cecil's recording equipment was all so retro. It wouldn't work, otherwise.

When Carlos pointed this out to the other scientists, that their perfectly functioning digital equipment and their piles and piles of mutating, gelatinous data was flawed, not because it was rebelling against nature but because it had actually been taken on faulty equipment – they didn't take it very well.

Carlos had seen some pretty catastrophic breakdowns when people's experiments had failed back in grad school but, well…this was worse.

Eventually, he scraped together the scientists that were still coherent and started developing a plan. Digital thermometers didn't work at all, he found, but alcohol thermometers did*, more or less, and Galileo thermometers were useful for air temperatures, and long as you adjusted them based on barometric readings.

Measuring time was harder. Carlos figured he'll start with a sundial, and a waterclock, and go from there.

Bit by bit, they started building up an arsenal of home-grown measuring devices. Carlos became the de facto leader of the scientists, in a way, mostly because he was the least likely to freak out when confronted with…well, with Night Vale. Carlos was secretly a little disappointed in the objectivity of his fellow scientists, but he didn't mention it. It wouldn't be helpful. After a few weeks under his guidance, they'd rebuilt several machines, and had all of the basics in place, and some of their readings were becoming a bit more consistent. His coworkers were looking a bit better, too – eating a bit more, shaking a bit less, forming more grammatically sound sentences – and in short, scientific progress in Night Vale was starting to look up. Carlos was pleased.

Their new measuring methods couldn't explain everything, though. Far from it. The earthquakes were still there, notably not shaking the town apart, even with the new seismograph they built out of supplies they got from Ralph's and Home Depot. The old house, for all practical intents and purposes, still didn't exist. And Radon Canyon defiantly glowed on in the distance.

...

Radio was omnipresent in Night Vale. Everyone listened to it – not just in the background, the way people had the radio playing in the background of shopping malls or on long road trips. They listened to it like people listened to old radio dramas – intently, huddled around the radio staring off into the middle space, their eyes glazed as they switched all of their attention to taking in the sounds reaching them over great distances of empty space. When Cecil's show came on, the crowd inside of Big Rico's went hushed, the clatter of plates stopped, and people REALLY listened. When their eyes met across the table, it was in mutual recognition. A shared joke, or warning, or a slowly building panic.

Carlos couldn't avoid hearing Night Vale Community Radio – he heard it in the hushed aisles at the Ralph's, and the booths at the All Nite Diner, and, worst of all, in the lab. The first time, Carlos had been with his team, up to his elbows in their newly reconstructed spectrophotometer. He'd recognized Cecil's voice almost immediately - slower and calmer and more articulate but still decidedly Cecil - and had deliberately tuned it out, getting a death grip on his needle-nose pliers.

It was slightly harder to ignore the other scientists' furtive glances through the bulbs and wires of the machinery as they worked.

When he actually heard his name, purring out of the radio, Carlos's stomach bottomed out. Cecil was talking about his haircut - he saw the other scientists catch each other's eyes nervously, and felt a rush of humiliation, his fingers fumbling at the base of his newly bared neck. Why was Cecil talking about his haircut? What had he done to deserve being singled out like this? How the hell was his haircut news? He felt exposed – like that dream you're wandering the crowded halls of your high school naked, praying nobody notices. Then, with dawning horror, he'd realized what Cecil was doing, heard Cecil's voice dripping with menace as he repeated the barber's name, saw the darkening expressions of his coworkers as they heard it repeated over and over, and rushed to shut the radio off.

In the months to come, Carlos would get used to hearing about himself on Night Vale Community Radio, if only out of self-defense – his panic reflex just wore down over time**. It was another weird Night Vale thing, another set of alarm bells going off in his head that he eventually had to just put to the side so he could buy groceries and pay the rent and progress with his experiments. Another reason to keep his distance from this town, to remain the objective outside observer.

In the months to come later – much, much later - he would wonder why, of all of the things he'd find he couldn't explain about Cecil, his need to compliment Carlos had struck him as the most disconcerting, the most unnatural, and the most unhinged.

...

*The more common mercury thermometers DID work, but they also whispered things to the scientists at anything lower than 50 or higher than 103 degrees fahrenheit, so Carlos wasn't trusting them for now.

*The adrenal system can only take so much strain before it overloads, and shifts to only activating the fight or flight reflex in cases of extreme and imminent danger. Carlos knew this – but some part of him still felt wrong about the way he couldn't even be bothered to run from an angry mob or unthinkable horror if it was more than 4 blocks away.


	4. Chapter 4

It wasn't until the day he burst in on the PTA meeting in a panic, shouting about time and unable to formulate a coherent argument AGAINST removing a lead door from an area which claimed to have active plutonium, that he really began to worry about his stress level.

He thought Josie might have noticed too. He suspected that was why she'd asked him to come by the house – it seemed unlikely she actually needed help with yard work, as she claimed, especially with all of her supposed "house guests", but Carlos had a hard time saying no to her.

The first thing Carlos had realized about Josephine Williams was that he liked her, very much. The second was that she frightened him. Rationally, when he saw her tiny form, a bundle of faded floral patterns tottering across her porch on knobbly knees, feet shuffling in her sensible orthopedics, he knew she should have been the least threatening person in Night Vale. And yet, when he looked down into her face to tell her hello in the line at Ralph's, he got a strange sense of vertigo, and found himself looking up at her, feeling small, and shy, and as though he were holding something behind his back that he really, really didn't want her to see but knew, with a sinking feeling in his gut, that she already knew about.

That was how he felt now, walking up to her front porch in late afternoon heat.

"Afternoon, Ms. Josie."

She looked him over from her perch on her avocado colored metal lawn chair, her feet dangling a few inches off the ground. "You made it out, then, hijo?"

He held out his arms, gesturing at himself "I said I would. Are you surprised?" Carlos wondered for a moment if he had misinterpreted the invitation, and his stomach knotted.

Old woman Josie just nodded, slowly, appraisingly. Carlos felt that sense of vertigo coming on, and plunged on, "You said you had some yard work you needed help with…?"

She continued to look him over for an uncomfortable moment, then, finally, she smiled at him. "You're a good boy" she said. "Yes, come over this way, I'll show you."

She toddled slowly off of the chair, and gathered up her cane, and Carlos offered her a hand as she climbed down the steps of the porch. She led him, painfully slowly, over to one side of the house, where about 10 large pots stood, shielded from direct sun by the side of the house. They were filled with soil – Carlos wondered if she was going to want him to plant something. It seemed a bit late to be planting in August.

"It's my arthritis," she told him. "Everything's ready to be picked this week, but here it's gone and flared up, and the scorpions will make short work of these if I don't gather them up soon. I would ask the angels, but they don't take well to it, some kind of allergy, I think."

"What are they?" Carlos asked, feeling like he was missing something obvious.

"A thinly veiled metaphor" she said. Carlos blinked at her.

She reached out to an area about 2 feet above the nearest pot, pinched her fingers together in an "ok" gesture, and twisted her wrist, holding her pointer finger and thumb up for Carlos to see.

"Leshy berries." She explained. "You know the invisible pie they serve down at the All-Nite? It's a local specialty. No?" She said, when Carlos shook his head. "Oh, you really should try it. They make lovely jams, too."

Carlos didn't know how to point out that there was nothing in the pots without being rude, and possibly gravely offensive. Instead he reached out, and experimentally ran his hand back and forth above the nearest one, where they encountered absolutely nothing.

Old woman Josie sighed, and reached up, taking Carlos's hand in her own.

"You young bucks know everything, don't you," she said, sounding exasperated.

She placed her small callused hand on the back of his own, and guided it back over the pot, and Carlos nearly pulled it back in shock, as he felt his fingertips brush glossy, thick leaves.

"You get yourself into trouble trusting your eyes too much around here." She told him. "Some things you have to take on faith, hijo."

The cognitive dissonance of touching something that was actually, truly invisible was more than Carlos had expected. His eyes and his fingers were duking it out for dominance. He blinked, then blinked again, then shook his head.

"It may help if you close your eyes, at least at first," she told him.

And that was how Carlos ended up spending half of his day in the blistering desert sun with his eyes closed, groping through Old Woman Josie's side yard. The invisible berry bushes, as it turned out, had invisible thorns, and by the time he'd worked his way through most of the pots (with Josie shouting occasionally and pointing at the pots with her cane when he missed something) he was filthy, sweating, and bearing a number of nasty looking scrapes.

He carried the fourth and final bucket of berries back up to the porch, where Josie was pouring out a large glass of sun tea. She offered it to him, and he sat down in the metal deck chair next to hers and drank it down in one go.

Carlos took one of the berries and rolled it around it his palm. It was still disorienting to look at it and feel it at the same time, but he was getting more used to it. It was small, and firm, similar in size and shape to a cranberry, but cool to the touch. He wondered if she'd let him take one back to the lab for some testing.

"You haven't tried one yet, have you?" she asked him.

He shook his head. "I figured I shouldn't. Not without asking…they're not poisonous or ...sentient, or anything?"

Josie rolled her eyes, and waved her hand at him. "Go on, then," she said, which, Carlos thought, wasn't actually a no.

He put the berry into his mouth, and closed his eyes, and bit down. It burst onto his tongue – and it tasted like a sunset.

Carlos heard himself sigh, his eyes still closed.

"That's why mine are the best," she said proudly.

Carlos hummed approvingly. He leaned back in the chair, and a gentle breeze kicked up, sending a pleasant chill through his sweat dampened shirt.

"There now," she said. "Feeling better?"

"Better? But I wasn't…" Carlos began, but one glance at Josie let him know she wasn't going to be having any BS today. "Yes." He said. "Yes, a bit better."

"Good." She said. "Because we need to have a little chat about your culture shock. Normally I don't do this – prefer to mind my own business, you know, but…a friend of ours has taken a special interest in you, and the last thing we need is our best scientist wandering off gibbering into the sand wastes, so I want to give you a little piece of advice." She leveled her eyes at him. "You need to calm down."

Carlos sighed. She was right, objectively, but… "I'm honestly not sure I know how."

Josie shook her head. "You need to stop looking at things like somebody who doesn't live in this town." She said. "It's all fine and good that you're running your experiments and helping remove lead hazards, but trying to science your way out of everything will only land you in re-education, or incinerated, or stuck in chronic existential crises like the rest of your little friends. Are you even listening to the radio?"

"A little." He said.

Josie glared at him.

"Okay, no, but…" he stammered, and he wanted to say "I don't understand why the local radio host calls me perfect" or "I'm not entirely sure he's human" or "There is something really sinister going on in that radio station and I'm going to get to the bottom of it" but Josie was making him feel like he was about five years old, and he found himself confessing, "it scares me."

Josie's expression softened, and she reached across to pat his hand where it rested on his knee.

"You're a good boy." She said again, and it held the weight of absolution. "But you need to give this place a chance. And you need to listen to the radio." She looked at him out of the corner of her eye, her expression a little too knowing. "Cecil isn't good at subtle, you might have noticed. But he won't hurt you."

"How can you be sure?" Carlos asked.

Josie shrugged. Both of their glasses of tea were full again, but Carlos was sure Josie hadn't refilled them. There wasn't even a pitcher nearby.

"I just know." She took another sip of tea, and the ice rattled lazily in her glass. "His heart is in the right place. I've seen the CT scans."


	5. Chapter 5

When Carlos went by the station Monday morning, Cecil was not in the recording booth, not in the thrall of some unseen monstrosity, not eerily intoning some ominous message, pouring radiation out into downtown Night Vale. He was in the front lobby, with a cup of coffee, looking over the shoulder of an intern who was writing something up on her laptop. Carlos stood warily on the threshold of studio door and watched through the glass. The intern had asked Cecil a question over her shoulder, something Carlos couldn't hear, and he'd tilted his head to the side, considering it, and then responded. She'd nodded thoughtfully, her fingers tapping away at the keyboard.

Everything looked really, painfully normal, all things considered.

Carlos had made the decision to stop by the station the night before, when a few of the scientists had come careening back from Radon Canyon, mentioning flashing lights and unintelligible noises. It wasn't that Carlos didn't TRUST his team, it was just – well – he still caught them staring in horror at the night sky sometimes, or reacting to sudden noises that Carlos couldn't hear, and he could really use some additional data points before he investigated further. The fastest and easiest way would be to check with Cecil's radio audience.

Still, it had taken him a full 15 minutes to work up the nerve to enter the studio.

What had really surprised him, more than anything else, was Cecil's reaction to him. They hadn't really spoken since his first day in the city, except through communication with the interns or the other scientists, but since his visit to Josie, Carlos had started listening to the radio – and it had been everything he'd feared it would be. For somebody who was supposed to be reading the news, Cecil poured his heart out pretty shamelessly on his show, and Carlos was one of his favorite topics.

But, in spite of himself, Carlos was also finding the show incredibly useful. It would be worth listening for the community calendar alone.

Still, Carlos had braced himself for awkwardness, or embarrassment, or even worse, some kind of outright advances – but the whole thing had been surprisingly not weird. Aside from the fact that Cecil was obviously a bit too pleased to see him, he didn't give any indication of being the same man who openly gushed about him on the radio. Whether he didn't think Carlos tuned in to the show, or just didn't care, Carlos wasn't sure - but he'd listened attentively when Carlos described the situation in the Canyon, and had agreed to ask his listeners to report any information they had. Carlos had tried to impress up on Cecil how serious this was, that there could be something potentially dangerous happening, something that could put lives at risk, if they didn't figure it out, and Cecil had furrowed his brow and nodded his head and generally, Carlos thought, put a good effort into looking like he was taking it seriously.

That night, when Carlos looked up from the data he was analyzing in the lab and heard Cecil express his disappointment that he hadn't brought up weekend plans, he felt a twinge of guilt, and wondered if he could afford to be a bit less cold.

He needed to establish boundaries, he reminded himself sternly. One step at a time.

...

Carlos was putting in the effort. He took up jogging in the mornings again, and quickly learned that it was best to stay entirely out of old town Night Vale before sunrise. He'd learned that when the air quality report included the words "speckled" or "vibrating" or "jacobian" that it was best to stay inside for the day. He stopped whispering when conversing with the other scientists in public, and sometimes told little scientific anecdotes to the empty lab, just in case the secret police were listening, and getting bored.

He was beginning to get to know his fellow scientists, too. It was easier now that they were functioning more or less like normal human beings – or normal Night Vale citizens, at any rate. He'd even learned a few of their names – Alice, whose militant adherence to the "no food in the lab" rule had saved them during the wheat and wheat by-product scandal, or Rakesh, who had adopted one of the floating kittens down at the radio station, or Garrett, who was obsessively running some personal experiments on some slime mold that he'd found outside his apartment that he swore was communicating with him telepathically. They joined him in the lab, more often than not. They went out for lunch together sometimes, and not just for their mandatory weekly trip to Big Rico's. They got a coffee machine, and took it in turns to replenish the supplies.

It was nice.

And then one day Carlos caught himself saying "I'm heading back home" when he had meant to say "I'm going back to the lab."

Carlos dismissed it as a Freudian slip, a hint at some type of homesickness for the outside world – but you had to wonder.


	6. Chapter 6

Carlos skidded to a halt behind a deep purple Scion that was parked along the street, his knees scraping against the gravel and concrete, tearing open his jeans. He heard several loud thunks, as wads – whether they were paper, or venom, or spit, he wasn't sure - collided with the side of the car, shaking it. He twisted around to try and see if he could make out his attacker through the glass of the car window.

"Carlos, hi!" said a breathless voice beside him.

"Cecil?" Carlos felt a wave of relief, and then a wave of horror at his relief. Well, nobody wanted to die alone, he figured. Cut yourself some slack.

Cecil gave a small wave, which was really unnecessary given their proximity. "This is a mess, isn't it? It's really going to put a damper on the junior high field day and endurance run. Although, I suppose it could be a motivator…." He pursed his lips as if considering it.

"Is it still there?" Carlos whispered, trying not to make any sudden movements.

"Oh the wasp?" Cecil said. As if they weren't crouching in a half deserted street while some hornet the size of a – well, the size of the Scion they were hiding behind – stalked the streets. Carlos couldn't hear its wing beats reverberating off the pavement anymore, but he had enough experience with regular sized wasps to know that didn't mean it wasn't hiding somewhere, waiting to strike. "No, it got distracted by something down the street when you ducked back here. They don't seem very bright."

Carlos rubbed at a stitch in his chest and sighed. Then a thought struck him. "They? It's not just the one?"

Cecil raised an eyebrow, and Carlos suddenly felt as if Cecil were explaining something very simple. "No its…you know wasps, there's usually a nest. We've seen several today. I should probably go check in with Simone about it, see if I can get a quote for the show later….

"Shouldn't we make sure there IS a show later?" Carlos asked, his voice sounding panicky in contrast to Cecil's. "Like, shouldn't we get out of here? Soon?"

"Oh, yeah – of course. My car is just a few over. I don't suppose…I mean…." Cecil looked embarrassed, and SHIT, where did he get off being bashful when they'd just been cornered behind a car by a wasp with a stinger the size of your forearm? "I don't suppose… you'd like a ride?"

Carlos gaped at him, incredulous. His first instinct was to shout, but he didn't want to attract the hornet's attention. A moment passed, and Cecil was starting to look a bit uncomfortable. This is Night Vale, he reminded himself. Carlos cleared his throat.

"Yes, thank you." He said calmly. "That would be great."  
Cecil looked relieved. He pointed to an old turquoise Firebird 3 cars down. "That's me, it's unlocked, just…best stay low."

They crouched low to the pavement, Carlos's already bloody knees stinging in protest, but they made it to the car safely. The passenger side door swung open of its own accord, and Cecil climbed across the front bench seats into the driver's. Carlos clamored in after him and slammed the door shut.

The engine revved, and Carlos started – Cecil hadn't put a key in the ignition.

"Aww!" Cecil laughed, patting the dashboard "She likes you! Well, of course she does, she has good taste… Don't worry!" he said, catching Carlos's expression, "She's basically completely domesticated now. You said you were on your way back to the lab, right?"

The ride was short, and Carlos didn't catch half of what Cecil was chattering about, but he nodded a bit and made "hmm"ing noises as his eyes darted about the streets, half expecting to have a stinger crashing through the window at every turn. When they finally came to a stop outside the lab, Carlos felt an overwhelming sense of gratitude for its (relative) safety. He reached in to his pocket to grab his keys and was halfway out the door when he remembered he really out to at least say thanks. He was just about to turn back when he felt a strong arm yank him back into the car, heard the screeching buzz of massive wings, and saw a bright blast of viscous green sludge fly past the spot he'd been standing in, scorching the pavement. So – it was venom after all, then.

Carlos felt the car spin and accelerate, throwing him forcibly into Cecil's side; he scrambled for purchase on the car's leather interior, and pulled his feet in time just in time for the door to snap shut.

"Sorry – so sorry! It looks like we need to circle the block, if you just want to get your seatbelt…I'm really sorry about that! Hang on for just a tick…"

Carlos righted himself, yanked the seatbelt across his chest, and checked the car's side mirror, where the giant hornet was gaining altitude and looked as if it were preparing to strike. Cecil's car was accelerating madly, and he turned abruptly to the left, down a side street. Carlos caught a glimpse of the junior high several blocks away, where several students in gym shorts and brightly colored t-shirts where leveling a barrage of bullets at one of the insects from their school-issue assault weapons.

"Carlos, if you wouldn't mind, would you do me a favor?" Cecil asked, his voice even and cool. The sound of it cut through Carlos's panic, and he felt his heart rate slow a fraction, against all reason. It was no wonder people turned to Cecil's show in times of fear – that voice was like a Valium. "Could you just reach into the glove compartment and grab that black canister with the blue lid? The BLUE one, not the red one."

"Got it."

"Thanks so much! Now, I'm just going to see if I can get these guys a few miles away, and then when I say, could you pull that little plastic tab and throw the whole canister out the window?"

"Sure," Carlos said. It wasn't a time for asking questions.

"Great!" Alright, almost there…can you see them? Are they still back there?"

"Yes," Carlos confirmed. "It looks like there are two now, about 70 feet above and 150 feet behind the car."

Cecil clucked his tongue. "We really need them a bit closer…hmmm. Okay, how about this - I'm going to slow down a bit to see if we can get them to make a dive for us. For this to work, I'll need to know exactly when they do, and then we'll need to drop the canister as soon as we're back up to speed. Does that seem like a plan?"

"Yes, got it," Carlos said. He'd rarely heard somebody simultaneously so polite and commanding. It somehow managed to instill a lot of confidence in a plan that, he thought later, REALLY shouldn't have seemed like a good idea.

But it worked. Cecil slowed the car nearly to a stop, the hornets rallied, slowed, and then dove in for the kill, and at Carlos's shout the car had leaped forward, accelerating wildly, and the canister Carlos threw out the window had exploded in a cloud of hazy, crackling blue smoke that smelled vaguely of baby powder.

Carlos hadn't actually seen the wasps drop, but when they returned to the lab, there was no more buzzing. Carlos hovered with his hand on the car door, anxiously looking in every possible direction before stepping out.

"All clear!" Cecil said cheerfully.

Carlos turned back to look at him, perched in the driver's seat, his hair dusty and blown backwards, his smile brilliant. Carlos opened his mouth, wanting desperately to say something meaningful. Nothing like this had ever happened to him before. Cecil had saved his life. Maybe he had saved Cecil's. For a weird, brilliant moment, they'd been a team. Maybe this was normal for Night Vale, but for Carlos, it seemed – beautiful. Intense. Strange.

Then the moment passed. Carlos looked at the man in the driver's seat, still smiling at him, but suddenly much more of a stranger, and less of a friend.

"Thanks," Carlos said simply, and he walked quickly back into the lab.


	7. Chapter 7

He was so close – a fraction of an inch away. His fingers were already tingling in anticipation, ghost-like sensations brushing across them, this tips of the jagged mountains, the tops of those black trees. A fraction of an inch more and he'd be dipping them into that roiling ocean….

He experienced the sudden twist of vertigo, the room spinning like the morning after too much cheap tequila, as though gravity had corrected itself before he'd fallen to the ceiling, and then Carlos awoke, his cheek pressed against something hard and cold and slick.

He was drenched in a cold sweat, and draped across the floor. His legs were tangled in the sheets, which were pulled taught where they'd been torn from the bed. His arm stretched out in front of him, his fingers touching nothing but the worn surface of the hardwood floor. The dark titan was gone.

He curled in on himself, as tightly as he could, and wept.

His phone rang, and he ignored it.

A few minutes later, it rang again, and this time he was able to uncurl himself, to reach out and answer it with a shaky hand.

"Hello?" His voice sounded thick with tears.

"Oh. Carlos." He felt another surge of vertigo, and raised his hand to his mouth, feeling as if he was going to be sick. The voice from the dream – or from the radio? From something….

"Carlos, it's Cecil." Oh, that's right.

"Hi." He said through his fingers, which were still shaking against his lips.

"I'm so sorry but, um, I wanted to check…" He sounded disoriented, so unlike he had in the dream, on the radio. Carlos wondered how he'd thought it was the same voice. The same man, maybe, but a different voice. "I just thought – ugh, sorry, the dream. Did you have the dream?"

"Yes." He answered, not bothering to clarify which dream. It didn't seem like he needed to.

"Yes, yes I thought you would." He paused. "We all did, of course, since it's December 15th , but you're still kind of new, so I wondered… Are you alright? Do you need somebody to drive you to the hospital? Sometimes people…the first time, you know, it doesn't always….sit well."

Carlos is having trouble forming sentences.

"I shouldn't have called," Cecil continues, " I know, it's so late…or early… but I wanted to make sure you were alright."

"I…" he started, then took a deep breath and started again. "I think …I think I'm alright." He finished. "I feel sick." He added.

"Yes, okaaay, that's actually good!" Cecil sounded relieved. "Yes, you may throw up later. That's ok, as long as it's not black, or teal, you're ok. If you start slipping back though, if you see it again, you need to get to the hospital."

"Okay, thanks."

"Sure." Cecil says, and he's talking more quickly now, starting to sound a bit more like himself. "Geeze, I'm really sorry, it's so late, I shouldn't have called. I'm glad you're alright though. If you need anything, don't hesitate to call, here or at the radio station – I'm always around. But anyway….I guess I'll let you go…"

"Wait." Carlos said. He was still trying to formulate thoughts, and his mind was thick and hazy and stupid, but he needed to ask something.

"Hmm?"

"You were narrating it."

"Yes." He said, more softly, "I do, every year."

"But in the dream, do you…"

There was a pause.

"I move the crates, too." He said, a bit sadly, and there was something resolute in his voice. "Just like everyone else."

"Oh." Carlos said. "Huh."

"Was that all?"

"Yeah."

"Alright." Cecil said, and his voice was gentle, "Goodnight, Carlos. Or Good Morning, I suppose."

"Good night." Said Carlos, but perhaps it was Good Morning. The sun wasn't up yet, hadn't even begun to tint the blackness of the void, but he stood, stretching and stumbling downstairs to make coffee. He wouldn't be going back to sleep tonight. He didn't think anyone else in town would, either*.

...

*He was wrong. Cecil went back to sleep. So did Old Woman Josie. Sleep is important – you have to be well rested when you are living in a city that's constantly trying to kill you.


	8. Chapter 8

Chapter Text

Carlos sighed into his forearms, feeling the heat of his breath fogging the top of the table in his lab. He had been awake for 18 hours already, having woken up obscenely early to chase a hunch about seismic activity manifesting itself as the glowing light in Radon Canyon, but it that hadn't panned out. The radio droned on in the background, and he knew he should be listening more closely, but he couldn't focus.

He knew the team was making progress. The new data they'd collected was behaving much better than what they'd had before: there had been no signs of the mucous membranes reappearing, and the fires were minor, and down to less than once a week.

But when it came to actually analyzing that data, Carlos and the team had hit a figurative wall.

It wasn't so much that doing science IN Night Vale was challenging. Carlos had found that with an open mind, a healthy disregard for his own safety, and a bad sense of humor, he was actually able to get the result he was going for 89% of the time. But that was beside the point.

The challenge was trying to get Night Vale science to connect to the outside world's science, to the scientific facts that they'd established in the rest of the known universe. Even now with their improved and more accurate data, Night Vale stood in absolute defiance of all of their collective scientific knowledge. None of their regular Newtonian constants seemed to work – in theory or in practice. (One of the scientists had nearly had a fit when they tested acceleration due to gravity, but Carlos felt there was something satisfying about watching a 2 oz weight float towards the earth a few seconds behind a 1 lb one.) And, while it was difficult to prove in practice, considering their methods for measuring it, Carlos thought things weren't looking so good for the speed of light either. If they couldn't count on that….what on earth were they supposed to use as a baseline? And how the hell were they supposed to get anything published that didn't sound like some bad Lovecraftian fiction?

"And now, the weather"

Carlos groaned and picked his head up off the table. The weather was always music, every night, always some song with words he didn't know from a band he'd never heard of, and doubted anyone else had heard of either. He wondered vaguely where Cecil found them. Did he pick them himself? Maybe the interns scrounged them up? For once, he'd just like to hear something he recognized…some Pink Floyd, maybe….

A breathy melodic voice accompanied by what sounded like a tin whistle filled the lab while Carlos absentmindedly returned to the task of transferring some plant samples that Rakesh had discovered out in the sand wastes into agar-filled petri dishes, and he wondered, not for the first time, how on earth Cecil managed it.

Cecil never missed a show. Not ever. Wednesdays were cancelled, the constellations roamed freely about the sky, nobody could feel the earthquakes and time itself was a moving target, but Cecil's show was dependable - it was one of the few things, maybe the only thing, you could count on in this town.

Hell, Carlos lived above his lab and half of the time between sentient cookware and portals opening in his walls he couldn't get downstairs, let alone get any actual work done.

Either Cecil was just that good at managing Night Vale, or there were other forces at work there. The consistency of Cecil's show, the fact that he was somehow allowed – or, possibly, compelled – to deliver it with such consistency - Carlos was certain it was significant, and the fact that he didn't know how irritated him. He faced anomalies and impossibilities on a daily basis here, to the point where the possibility of a constant, a control group, was almost irresistibly enticing.

Carlos ran his hands through his hair, which was slowly growing back, starting to curl out again at the base of his neck. The idea nagged at him more and more every time he ran into Cecil – which was actually pretty frequently. It was rare for Carlos to go more than a week without bumping into him somewhere – at town hall meetings, or sheltering in the same abandoned building from a deluge of blood rain, or on a midnight trip to the library. It had been worrying, at first, for obvious reasons – even in a seemingly small town one doesn't like to run into one's potentially murderous stalker on a semi-weekly basis - but eventually he had had to accept that the town was going to throw them together quite a bit just by the nature of their chosen career paths*. A reporter and a scientist – they both had that slightly deranged habit of rushing headlong into the new and/or unexplained.

Carlos snorted. Like Pliny the Elder, he thought. He could totally see Cecil running into Pompeii.

The petri dishes giggled softly back at him.

"Stop that." He said, thumping them sternly.

At any rate, Carlos hadn't given up on learning what was going on down at the radio station. Far from it. In fact, he found himself reopening that strictly metaphorical mental file more and more often lately.

Terrifying as it was, part of him was dying to charge back into the station armed with Geiger counters and camp outside station management's door until he had an answer.

There was just that one catch.

Night Vale needed that radio show.

Warnings about upcoming holidays, alerts about changing laws, Cecil's horrible PSAs – they gave people a fighting chance to stay alive. Night Vale listened carefully, and they'd been listening for so long, they'd hung so often on Cecil's words, that even the things he notably didn't say, or the retractions that they knew better than to believe, were played a pivotal role in people's daily lives. Since he'd started listening, even Carlos had found himself identifying the subtle shifts in Cecil's tone – the rich resonance of a true warning, the crisp articulation of a formal government-mandated message, the lilting cadence of a reminder that they probably didn't need to take seriously.

Carlos didn't like to think what Night Vale would be like without the semblance of order and normalcy Cecil's show projected out to the community.

But that semblance of normalcy would have a price – and Carlos suspected that Cecil might be the one paying it.

And Carlos found he didn't like to think of that either.

"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." he reminded himself, "The whole town's safety would be at risk if I started an investigation. Cecil can take care of himself."

"Of course he can. Of course!" whispered the petri dishes. "You're doing the right thing."

Carlos frowned at them.

"You look great, you know" they continued, "That shirt fits you really well…"

Carlos sighed, pulled out the acetylene torch from under his desk, turned up the gas, and unceremoniously torched the whole desk. He would have to apologize to Rakesh tomorrow, but he wasn't keeping anymore sentient plant samples in the lab. Not after last month.

A deep, resonant voice wished him good night from his portable radio.

Carlos stretched, carefully closed his notebook, and went upstairs.

...

*Carlos accepted this for 3 reasons: first, Cecil looked like Christmas had come early every time they ran into each other, which Carlos suspected meant he was as surprised as Carlos was; second, the incidents hadn't increased in frequency, and seemed to correlate directly with the number of newsworthy/scienceworthy incidents; and third, Carlos was still wearing his own skin and hadn't been chopped up and hidden in a crawlspace by said radio host. Yet, at least.


	9. Chapter 9

There was a pounding sound, frantic and forceful, and as Carlos awoke it shifted from something sinister and foreboding in a dream to something annoying and abrasive in a semi-awake haze, to something sinister and foreboding as he came to consciousness because it was 5:00 in the morning, and in this city, who or what would be pounding violently on his door at this hour?

He stumbled down from the efficiency above the lab, grabbing the can of bear spray and a baseball bat that he kept at the bottom of the stairwell, but as he turned the corner he saw the lab door flicker and burst open, and there was Cecil, tie askew, breathless, his arms full of plastic bags. He was radiating urgency and anxiety, and the air was suddenly crackling with static electricity. He jerked his head around the lab, catching sight of Carlos, baseball bat raised, and their eyes meet and relief flickers across Cecil's face, the relief of somebody who has just crossed "Urgent to do #1" off of a long, long list.

"Carlos! Thank heavens! Where is your stone circle?"

Carlos considered several things. He wondered if the door was broken, and how he would fix it. He wondered whether he should lower the baseball bat or not. He registered that he was not wearing anything but boxers and an under shirt, which should probably have made this situation with this particular person exceptionally awkward, but Cecil seemed not to have noticed; he was turning frantically around the lab, looking for something.

"Carlos!" he snapped, and Carlos answered.

"I…um…I haven't gotten one yet, I…"

Cecil let out a groan of frustration and dropped to the floor, tearing a small pouch out of one of the bags, and he was moving hurriedly, aggressively, and although his tone was even when he spoke again, it was shot through with anxiety. Six months ago, Carlos wouldn't have recognized it, but he, like the rest of Night Vale, knew this voice. And now he knew that something was very, very wrong.

"They didn't give us any warning, this year, no warning and how…." He was arranging small round pieces of heliotrope in a circle on the floor, ripping open a package of some powder that might have been cinnamon "…how is anyone supposed to prepare, we don't have any TIME…" His hands were moving quickly, too quickly for Carlos to see what he was doing, but there was something small and delicate, like the bones of a bird, and something glossy and thick and dark dripping into the center of the stones, and Carlos was transfixed.

Cecil stopped suddenly, splaying his hands out on either side of the circle, the fabric of his shirt taut across his back as he bent over it, whispering, and Carlos had that feeling again, that he had the first time he entered the studio, that Cecil was flickering, electric; that something powerful and dangerous was surging through him uncontrolled.

Cecil turned to him, his eyes dark, his voice a deep imperative.

"DO NOT touch this, Carlos. Do not approach it. DO NOT, whatever you do, DO NOT leave the house until it's over."

Carlos felt dazed, as if he'd been struck. He lowered the baseball bat, and Cecil looked suddenly sad, as though he was only now really looking at him.

"I know" he said, "I know, you don't understand, but please…PLEASE, Carlos, do this for me. I can't explain, there's no time, and I still have to…"

He made a frustrated sound, and before Carlos could move Cecil has crossed the room, and he felt arms closing around him fiercely, embracing him. Carlos barely had time to react, was just about to raise his hands to return the gesture, when Cecil pulled back, gripping his upper arms firmly, bracing him.

"Turn your ac down. And turn the radio on," he said, and Carlos nodded, and Cecil was out the door, taking the remaining bags with him.

Carlos sank to the floor. He stayed there for several minutes, trying to reason out why, in spite of his previous decision NOT to trust this man, he always feels compelled to follow his advice. Why his arms, of their own volition, had moved to return his embrace. Whether or not it would be okay for him to make coffee before he huddled in to hide from whatever holiday or random Night Vale terror it was that they were apparently hiding from.

He stalked to the thermostat, cranking it down to its coldest setting. Carlos heard the thrumming as the AC kicked in. Then he turned on the radio, knowing that Cecil's show wouldn't be on for at least another hour, and listened to the dead air. Cecil had looked like he had more stops to make. Carlos fiddled with the edge of his shirt, wondering idly if he was first on the list. He wondered if that should make him feel relieved – probably it shouldn't. Probably that should be exceptionally concerning, to be singled out that way. But it was probably a bit late for that at this point.

He shivered. It was going to be a long day.

...

Carlos didn't really remember how he got there, but he was standing in the park, watching what seemed like the entirety of Night Vale coming out of its darkest, most hidden recesses*, in some kind of tantric group catharsis. He saw this, objectively, as a scientist, but he felt it as well. He was only human, and he was alive.

People were churning, embracing, touching, weeping. He caught sight of Cecil in a small cluster of people about 20 feet away – he was reaching out to them, being tapped on the shoulder, embracing them in turn.  
He turned towards a young girl with dark hair who had just walked up, one of his interns, Carlos thought, and he took her face in hands and he was beaming at her, joy and relief playing shamelessly across his open face, but there were tears on his cheeks, and Carlos felt his heart constrict. Then the girl caught sight of Carlos, and pointed, and Cecil looked up, and all of that raw emotion was suddenly turned on him, and he froze. Cecil's face was a cascade of emotions, the raw shock of recognition, a flood of relief, and then he was laughing, fresh tears sliding down his cheeks as he raised his hand, and waved. Carlos lifted his hand, managed a wave, and a small smile, and Cecil's turned away, burying his face in his hands, and he was hunched over, sobbing with relief into Old Woman Josie's tiny shoulder; and Carlos had never felt more emotionally inadequate than he did then, in that moment, standing 20 yards from a man who had just saved his life, probably not for the first time, probably not for the last, overwhelmed by an emotion he  
had no earthly idea how to articulate; and watching it unfold so effortlessly, so elegantly, from somebody else.

...

The night air at the edge of Radon Canyon was cool and crisp – nowhere near the icy chill Carlos had been taught to expect of nights in the desert. So many things were turning out that way, he thought, leaning back on his hands and feeling the grit of the desert soil dig into his palms. He was feeling – disoriented. Like when you walk out of a movie theater after dark that you went into in the daylight, and you feel like the time spent in the fictional world of the film shouldn't have actually elapsed in your real world, and you don't really feel certain of how much of it has. Like that.

He sighed and stared into the Canyon. Maybe Cecil was right. Maybe the lead door was just a hackneyed sci-fi cliché. Was it possible that somebody would put a lead door labeled with Plutonium warnings in a place where there WASN'T something they were trying to hide?

Carlos ran a hand through his hair in frustration. This whole town defied logic.

He was a fucking scientist. He'd made an entire life out taking measurements and structuring arguments, building systems of understanding around complex problems, and breaking them down and organizing them. He trusted those systems like he trusted his own hands. They had never failed him. He had been so excited about coming to Night Vale, but the last few months had made him realize how – helpless he was. Ineffectual.

And then there was Cecil, who kept showing up, with his contradictory opinions, and his unquestioning faith in the municipal rules, and his frankly TERRIBLY unobjective radio commentary. Cecil, who couldn't conceal his emotions to save his life, whose over-ambitious reports were always being censored, or requiring retraction, or earning him re-education sessions, but for whom the whole town seemed to share an overwhelming affection and gratitude. Cecil, who seemed to have taken Carlos, entirely unwillingly, under his protective wing.

Carlos's system wasn't working in Night Vale. And, whether he liked it or not, Cecil's just…did. Neither of them would still be here if it didn't.

And Carlos felt like he was adapting – he really did. His lifestyle, his scientific equipment, his body's ability to process radioactive isotopes…he was adapting everything. But that didn't change the fact that the scientific community had rules. His research here stood on the backs of thousands of years of brilliant men and women, thousands of lifetimes devoted to the pursuit of truth. If he couldn't find the connection point, if his research here in Night Vale didn't add anything to that complex and beautiful lexicon of human knowledge – then what was the point of it?

"Вы не найдете то, что вы ищете здесь."

Carlos scrambled forward, scraping a hole into his jeans, and staggered as he attempted to turn around and stand up at the same time.

"Holy…shit, you scared me!"

The Apache Tracker stood staring at him, his face an impassive blank. Even at only a few feet away, he was half obscured in the darkness, the light of the waxing moon catching him at odd angles. Like this, there wasn't enough light to see the garish colors of his plastic painted headdress. You could almost be convinced it was something more than a dollar store knock off. Almost.

The man (it made Carlos slightly uncomfortable to refer to him by his chosen moniker) spoke again in Russian.

"I'm sorry, I don't…" Carlos said. "Oh wait, you know what? Hold on a second…."

The man watched patiently as Carlos pulled out his cellphone, swiping his finger across it a few times, and then holding it up to the man's face.

"Google translate. Just speak slowly, and try to enunciate."

The man's eyes darted down to the phone, the glow of the screen lighting him from below. Then he stared back up at Carlos, looking into his eyes, and spoke.

After a moment, the phone beeped, and lit up.

"You will not find what you are looking for in this canyon." it said.

Carlos looked up from the phone and eyed the other man carefully. "Alright," he said after a moment. There was no point wasting time with "Why are you here" or "What the hell does that mean" or "How on earth did you sneak up on me, geeze, you're like a cat". So he asked "What is it I'm looking for?"

The man raised an eyebrow. He held up his wrist, and tapped at his watch, dark and glistening and expensive looking. Carlos had never noticed it before, but it seemed oddly out of place now.

He spoke into the phone. "You are running out of time." It read back to Carlos.

Carlos stared at him. "Time for what?" he asked.

The Apache Tracker reached out and put a hand on his shoulder.

"There's a flower," he said, in perfect English, his voice deep and gravelly, "There's a flower, in the desert."

He looked a little sad, almost apologetic, and Carlos felt a strong, reassuring pressure against his shoulder before the other man removed his hand.

And then he walked away. It should have taken a long time for him to disappear into the long, moonlit distance, but once he was gone Carlos felt as if he had vanished in an instant.

Well, he thought. If he was trying to adapt to small-town science, taking research direction from a mysterious and clandestine local seemed a good way to start.

Time. Maybe it was time to take another look at the clocks.

...

*Night Vale's darkest, most hidden recesses are several orders of magnitude darker and more hidden that that of the average southwestern American town. So it took a while.


	10. Chapter 10

"I don't know what's happening." Carlos said quietly into his cell phone. He didn't realize how much that had been weighing on him until it was out of his mouth. It felt freeing to finally say it out loud, like a confession. He had NO IDEA what was happening, he repeated to himself. NO IDEA.

Refocusing his studies on the temporal anomaly that was their little desert community had been some of his most terrifying research yet. What was most alarming was that the data was actually leading him towards a hypothesis – something most of his and the other scientist's data flatly refused to do. And of course, it was something huge, and terrifying and impossible. Time was slowing down in Night Vale. Which meant – what? Somehow the city was accelerating in relation to their observations, approaching the speed of light? Some type of obscene fluctuations in the mass of the town causing distortion in time? He'd called Cecil partially in a vain hope that he might already have some simple explanation for the distortion and partially because he was a bit panicked and Cecil's voice acted as a low-grade soporific, but the conversation had kind quickly devolved into Carlos recounting the details of his research methods, as if that would make it more understandable just how serious the problem was.

There was a pause on the other end of the line, and Carlos got the sinking feeling he always got when he realized he'd gone off on a tangent and lost his audience.

And then Cecil said: "Neat!"

Neat. Carlos had called Cecil in a flurry of panic and excitement, had babbled on about calculations and statistics that were honestly a bit tangential to the point, had told him that time was LITERALLY slowing down, and Cecil had thought it was neat.

Carlos had to swallow down the "I know right?!" that bubbled up in his throat.

It was neat. Panic inducing, and against the established laws of physics, but also – kinda neat.

But Carlos didn't say that. Instead, he cleared his throat, saying, "Cecil, I need you to get the word out on your radio show. See if anyone has noticed a massive time shift." And Cecil had animatedly agreed.

And now, here he was, taking apart clocks.

He'd opened up 4 so far. One he'd picked up at the Ralph's, one Alice had brought in from her apartment, one had been in the lab when he'd moved in, and one, most alarmingly, was his own wristwatch, which he'd received as a graduation gift from his mother when he completed his PHD, and which he was certain came from this plane of existence.

None of them contained anything even remotely resembling circuitry, or gears. Which, he supposed, meant it was a good thing he'd been collecting the last week's measurements with the waterclock.

Carlos gingerly unscrewed the back off of another clock, this one something he'd picked up from old woman Josie when he re-opened his investigations on time. It made a hissing noise as it came loose, and began to swell and ooze with some kind of gray substance. Grabbing a nearby pair of tongs, he pried the back off of it, only to find several small, white nubs that looked like under-developed teeth floating in the dark mass.

Carlos carefully put down the tongs, took off his gloves, and picked up his cell phone.

...

Carlos doesn't remember how he got here – here, in an over-sized booth at the Moonlite All-Nite Diner, watching the tiny lightning storms flash through the cumulus clouds that formed when the creamer hit his coffee. Waiting for Cecil.

Carlos knew he had met the man in the tan jacket. Everyone knew that – he'd heard his own terrified voice broadcasted over the radio, cowering in the front room of the lab and peeking out the window like a scared child. But knowing that he'd met the guy hadn't caused any sort of miraculous flashback that gave him any insight into what the hell had happened. It just made him feel kind of unsettled. Like there was something really important that he'd forgotten to do, and he could still feel it – shapeless, but insistent - itching at the back of his brain.

He had tried to remember – wracked his brain for a few hours, leveraging every memory recall technique in his arsenal from his days as an undergrad – but he'd been rewarded with an ugly headache and a violent nosebleed, so he'd given up on it.

What he didn't know was why on earth had he asked to meet Cecil in person? Like Cecil couldn't have TEXTED him the number of his contact at the mayor? Like he couldn't have just called him back to get it later?

Carlos wasn't proud to admit it, but he could wager a guess. He'd been scared. Scared and shaken up and desperate for the promise of a friendly face the next day to help him get through a night of reeling at the terrifying implications of his research, and of his forgotten but still unsettling visitor.

And now he'd given Cecil the wrong impression – another thing the whole town knew - and he was going to have to try to fix that, to let him down easy and – God, he wasn't good at this.

The door of the diner chimed, and Cecil walked in – elegant, poised – and calmly greeted him, keeping his voice in its low, rich radio timbre. He had practiced this; Carlos could tell. It was never hard to tell with Cecil.

Carlos stood up, reached out his hand formally for a handshake, and Cecil looked at it for a moment, confused, and then smiled, gripping it warmly.

They sat.

"Cecil," Carlos said, keeping his tone cold. "Thank you for meeting me. I need your help with a strictly professional problem."

Carlos watched as the word "professional" hit home, watched as the realization dawned, saw Cecil's face fall. He heard Cecil's little "oh" of disappointment, saw him look down quickly, then visibly rally himself, turning on a smile – and damn, but Carlos feels like a total asshole right now.

He wanted to say something comforting, but he knew he couldn't risk it.

"It's about the clocks, right?" Cecil asked, "You mentioned in your messages there was something going on with them?"

"Yes" Carlos said, "it's about the clocks. And…" and he suddenly felt that itching at the back of his mind return, felt it begin to take shape, completely derailing his train of thought and demanding his full attention. He blinked, then shut his eyes and focused, trying to wrap his mouth around the newly forming idea that suddenly struck him as really, really important.

"…and I also need to tell you about the subway," he found himself saying. He was not really sure where that came from.

"Subway?" Cecil said, glancing sideways quickly before leaning in. "Like – devour your own empty heart, Subway?"

"No like…like public transit." Carlos said. Cecil was frowning at him, his forehead furrowed in thought, and Carlos was frowning back. Carlos was sure this wasn't what he was supposed to be talking about. He was looking into time. He had about thirty open clocks dripping an unidentified grey substance onto his lab bench to back him up on that. Subways were in no way related. Only…the stinging sensation at the back of him mind said they were. He scratched at the back of his head absentmindedly. It didn't help, naturally.

Cecil tapped his chin thoughtfully. "We've never had a subway in Night Vale. Not that I'm not all for it, I mean – I think a subway would be a great idea…."

"Yes!" Carlos exclaimed, and his voice was a little too loud, and the rest of the diner hushed awkwardly for a moment. He sank lower in his seat, and waited for the regular chatter to resume before saying, "I'm sorry, I don't know why I…but yes. Subways." He rubbed at his temples. "And there's something else, Cecil, there's a ….a refrigerator, burning and…" his ears started to ring, and he pressed his palms into his eyes. "There's something crawling out…if I could just….I can almost…." he felt something warm dripping down his face, and this was NOT how this conversation was supposed to go, but if he could just REMEMBER…

"Oh – "Cecil said, sounding concerned, "Oh - dear – Carlos, don't do that." Carlos looked up. Cecil's hands were frozen in mid-air, as if he'd been reaching out to him and pulled up short at the last moment. He quickly folded them in his lap. "That's a pretty strong memory wipe, please don't fight against it. It won't do any good, and you don't want to risk hurting yourself." Carlos saw the blood dripping from his own nose onto his hands, and attempted to staunch it with one of the diner's cheap paper napkins. "Trust me, if there's a subliminal message that's been planted under it, it's best to just relax and let it take its course."

Subliminal messages? Carlos scowled. Is that what this was? Was that what the man in the tan jacket had wanted him for? It struck him as – particularly unsavory. Forgetting was one thing, but something had been planted, in his brain? He felt violated – that was his brain. He loved his brain!

But he was also bleeding. And to be fair, Cecil probably had more practical experience with this kind of thing than he did….so he, too, folded his hands in his lap, and took a deep breath. He relaxed into it, and allowed his mind to go blissfully blank. The stinging in the back of his mind subsided, melted into a warm glow, slipped into his throat.

"There's a flower in the desert" he heard himself say, as if from far away. "This is your second warning."

Cecil's eyes went wide.

"Yes," he said sadly, "Yes, I know."

Carlos stared at Cecil for a long moment, feeling the blissful relief of having a heavy weight lifted from his shoulders – like walking out of your last final exam and into the cold, sunny, liberating air of winter break – his mind peaceful, quiet. He took in Cecil's pale, wide eyes, his slightly parted lips, cataloging them objectively. Subliminal messaging, the thought vaguely, must do a number on your dopamine levels.

"Is that all of it?" Cecil asked softly.

And then, like a snap, Carlos came back to reality.

"Um….yeah. Seems like it." He shook his head. "I'm really sorry about that, I didn't realize..."

"Don't be." Cecil said, frowning. "It's not your fault. Although it's quite a rude way of sending messages, using other people's subconsciences. I should do an editorial reminder about it on the show…" he trailed off.

"That message." Carlos said, watching Cecil with some concern. He wouldn't meet his eye. "Did that – mean anything to you? It's just – I think I've heard it before somewhere….*"

"Well…not really, no." Cecil shrugged. "Sorry about that."

Carlos frowned. Eight months in Night Vale, six of which had been spent listening to that voice on the air, told him that Cecil was not telling him something. Plus Cecil was still decidedly not meeting his eye, fiddling with the paper napkin and seemingly attempting to fold it into a paper crane, which made it kind of obvious.

The silence dragged on uncomfortably.

What were they supposed to be talking about again?

Oh yeah.

"Look Cecil, I was hoping you could get me a contact at the Mayor's office? I really wanted to ask them about the clocks…"

"Oh! Sure, of course." Cecil said lightly, crumpling up the napkin, "Anything to aid the scientific community, right?"

Fifteen minutes later, Carlos was walking out of the diner with a list of instructions (of course there was a ritual instead of a phone number, Carlos didn't know why he'd expected anything different) and a unsettling feeling that, without meaning too, he'd just said both too much, and too little.

...

*He had. So had Cecil. So have you. Remember, listeners?


	11. Chapter 11

There were, quite surprisingly, not that many bars in Night Vale, especially considering that "drink to forget" was the favorite municipally-sanctioned coping mechanism for the terror of living in this forsaken city.

Carlos normally didn't take that bit of advice but…it had been an exceptionally weird day.

Carlos hadn't killed his double – but he hadn't liked him either. He'd opened the door of his lab that morning and found the man standing there, in the center of the room, taking down notes on a pocket notepad, with a pen.

His other self had looked up at him, and stared. His double was identical to him, except for his expression – he seemed to Carlos to be sneering. Distainful. Unimpressed.

"Well…" this other him had said, casting his eyes about the room and clicking his retractable pen. "I'm assuming this is your lab. But I have no idea where I am. Theories?"

"The sandstorm," Carlos had said, carefully, not moving. He felt an overwhelming urge to throttle this other man, but he was fighting it down. He needed to figure out what was going on first. "It's causing some sort of disturbance, potentially a thinning between alternate universes, or some form of very rapid biological regeneration. Obviously we haven't had much time to collect evidence." He raised an eyebrow, "I'm Carlos. This is my lab. You're in Night Vale."

"Your explanation isn't entirely satisfactory, but…Night Vale. That would make sense." He cast his eyes over to Carlos's homegrown electron microscope. "You wouldn't find anything quite so…folksy at the Strex Corp labs."

Carlos was surprised to find that the implied insult to Night Vale rankled him as much as the obvious insult to his equipment.

"I don't suppose you'd care to propose a course of action, then?" Carlos asked, through gritted teeth, working to keep his tone neutral.

The man stared back at him. "We're both reasonable people." He said. "At least I assume we are, as you appear to be some alternate version of myself. I doubt collaboration between two versions of the same mind will result in any substantial synergies, but I suggest we attempt to gather the facts, first." He smirked. "That is, if you'd be willing to share your….lab space…with me."

And they had. And it had been awful.

In the end they'd been able to tap into some kind of dark, swirling vortex, and the other version of Carlos had walked into it, giving him a Breakfast Club style wave over his shoulder without looking back, and the vortex had closed after him.

The whole event had left Carlos feeling – dirty. Tainted. Unsure. As if he'd been forced to look face to face with the person he'd spent years making sure he didn't become. So here he was, sitting on the grimy leather barstool of the transient bar that could only be reached by a literal hole in the wall in the back of the Moonlite All-Nite Diner, staring into his fourth Moscow mule and wondering if he should just give up and order the vodka straight.

"Hey there Cecil," Carlos heard the bartender's gravelly voice across the room, "Another intern?"

Carlos looked up. Cecil had entered the bar without his notice, and seemingly without noticing him. He was looking uncharacteristically disheveled, his pant legs were soaked with something Carlos knew better than to pretend was something other than blood, and he was leaving little red smears where he'd come in the door*.

"Um…I'm actually not sure this time." Carlos's stomach clenched. Cecil sounded like shit. "But…I don't think so. I think it's still Dana." Carlos risked a glance and saw him giving the bartender a small smile. "Small blessings, right?"

The bartender made a non-commital grunt, and poured Cecil a small glass of something very dark and opalescent.

Carlos watched as Cecil accepted the glass with a "thanks," and stared into the contents for a long moment, before drinking down about half of it in one go. Carlos watched his throat move as he swallowed, saw his adam's apple shift as he drank – gulped - the dark liquid. Mental faculties inhibited as they were, Carlos didn't realize he was staring until a split second after Cecil had put the glass down, looked around the room, and caught his eye.

There was a moment of recognition, and Cecil's face lit up the way it always did when he saw Carlos, with a mixture of relief and joy and admiration, and maybe it was the vodka or the shit day he'd just had but Carlos couldn't even manage to be made uncomfortable by it. Then there was a moment of hesitation, and Carlos watched Cecil was anxiously trying to decifer whether it would be ok if he came over or not. It was painful to watch. Screw it, Carlos decided - and he jerked his head, indicating that Cecil should join him.

"May I?" Cecil asked unnecessarily, pulling out the barstool nearest to him.

"Only on the condition that you don't tell your radio listeners about it" he said, and then blanched – that was a bit strong, he should really be thinking more before he spoke "I mean – you know." He indicated his drink. "Wouldn't want to tarnish my reputation with the scientific community." He added.

Cecil grinned wryly, "Well, I'd have to admit to being here myself so…you're probably safe. Call my silence a professional courtesy."

"Cheers," Carlos said, lifting his glass.

They drank in silence for a few moments.

"Glad to see you made it back." Carlos said after a moment. "I heard the broadcast."

"Oh…yes, thanks!" Cecil said, looking pleased. "Thanks, I'm happy to be home." He looked suddenly alarmed, "Oh my gosh, but I didn't even ask, did you…?"

Carlos put up a hand. "No casualties at the lab today. We opened some kind of vortex; I think my double's back where he came from. I hope so, at least." he said, then cocked an eyebrow "Unless you were asking if I'd been replaced?"

"Of course not, honestly." Cecil scoffed, as if Carlos were being ridiculous. "You're obviously still you."

Carlos wanted to say that there was no way Cecil could possibly know that, but he didn't have the heart. And…well, he wasn't sure. Maybe Cecil could tell.

Carlos looked over at Cecil, who was quietly stirring his viscous drink with a cocktail straw and avoiding Carlos's eye, and tried to remember why exactly he'd been avoiding the guy. That first night at the radio station, it had been…weird. There was definitely something hidden about him, something strange and potentially dark that Carlos didn't understand, that perhaps, he was beginning to suspect, Cecil himself wasn't totally aware of. But the fact that Carlos didn't or couldn't understand it didn't NECESSARILY make it malicious. He had seen stranger things in Night Vale. And he'd had many supposedly "safe" things he thought he did understand try to kill him – like wheat, or librarians, or his own toothbrush. "Safe" didn't really mean much here.

He stared at Cecil, and then he remembered, and somewhere between the ethanol in his veins and his naturally shoddy understanding of what made acceptable social conversation, Carlos found his mouth plunging ahead where his mind, if it were fully present, wouldn't have allowed him to go.

"So, I've been meaning to ask you." He heard himself say.

Cecil looked over, his expression obscenely hopeful.

"The thing with Telly…"

Cecil's expression darkened immediately. It was alarming how fast that happened, like a veil dropping over him and obscuring him with this other…thing. It made Carlos want to wave a hand over his face, but he resisted the urge.

"What about…TELLY."

"I kindof want to know why you felt he deserved what he got. Seemingly for cutting my hair. Which, I should point out, was his JOB, and what I went there for."

"For TAKING your hair." Cecil said. "I stand by what I said before, Carlos. I'm not sorry for what befell Telly the Barber." His voice was getting deeper. "Telly's fate was sealed before you stepped foot in this town, Carlos. Telly had a history. We had all turned a blind eye, but Telly knew…"

"Nope, don't give me that." Carlos said abruptly, shaking his head and waving a hand at him, "Don't answer me in that ominous 'I'm hinting at obscured truths that we all understand' radio voice. Not when you know I don't. Understand them, I mean."

Cecil stared at him, wide eyed. He sighed.

"I'm serious Cecil, you…you RUINED his LIFE. I know there's a lot of weird shit here I still don't understand but – you kindof made me responsible for that. And I can't condemn some random barber because he did a shitty job when he cut my HAIR."

"Carlos," Cecil said, and the look on his face said that he was being as honest as he possibly could. It was almost pleading, "Carlos, he TOOK your hair. He HAD your hair. You were so new in town, you couldn't have realized, but – we barely made it in time!"

Carlos stared into Cecil's wide, pleading eyes and….well, wait, that was odd wasn't it? Telly had kept his hair. He'd even had it with him out in the sand wastes. Why would a barber be keeping people's hair…keeping Carlos's hair….

There were two types of technology that work in Night Vale. The old, and the very, very old.

Voodoo, Carlos thought, probably qualified as very, very old.

The realization must have shown on Carlos's face, because Cecil sighed, sat back, put a hand over his eyes. "If you had just asked, I could have shown you the proper process, the rituals to dispose of it safely, but I never thought…," and here he removed his hand to look chastisingly down at Carlos, "I never thought you would actually CUT it, Carlos…it was so…so…"

"I know, I know," Carlos cut him off, "Perfect."

"Yes," Cecil said, his expression softening, his eyes misty.

"Wait," Carlos continued, "but he still had it, that first time he showed up, out in the sand wastes. He still had my hair. You said so, on the show." Carlos said, feeling suddenly a bit concerned.

Cecil looked embarrassed. "Yes, well…I might have made a quick run out there, just to finish up…" he put his hands up in a display of innocence "Just to make sure it was taken care of, I didn't touch Telly, cross my heart! Actually, I felt really awkward about the whole thing – it seemed so presumptuous, being in possession of another person's hair – of your hair, Carlos, of all people's. I would much rather have had you there and just shown you the proper rituals but….well, it didn't seem like we were on the best terms at that point…I wasn't sure what else to do…" He was twisting his hands together.

"No, I …" Carlos cleared his throat. "I really appreciate it. Thank you."

Cecil's was beaming at Carlos again. Carlos wanted to laugh – this guy was so transparent it was ridiculous.

"Sure," he said.

Carlos ordered them another round.

"I've been here nearly a year, you know." He said.

"Yes, I know!" said Cecil. "2 weeks from this Thursday!"

Carlos snorted into his drink. Of course Cecil knew. "You know, a year in this town- I've rebuilt half my lab from scratch, figured out how to track data without pens, I don't even flinch when I hear the sunrise. I actually LIKE the invisible pie." He put the heels of his hands over his eyes. "I deserve some sort of an award for making it this far."  
Cecil's brow was furrowed, as if he were giving it considerable thought.

"The worst part is, I don't even know if I'm making progress towards figuring out how to fix it. I don't even know if I WANT to fix it. I mean, I want to keep the citizens safe obviously but…" he sighed. "I think this town is giving me Stockholm's syndrome."

"What, the whole town?" Cecil asked, as though disbelieving. There was a hint of amusement in his voice, and his nose was slightly pink, and Carlos wondered if he was feeling the – whatever it was he was drinking. "Not just – like, the secret police or something? All of Night Vale?"

"Yup" Carlos said, popping the "p" and taking another deep draught of whatever it was the bartender had brought him.

"So….," Cecil said slowly, "you like it here, then?"

Carlos buried his face in his arms, moaning something meant to sound like a denial.

"You DO don't you?" he said, his voice filling with amusement and affection. "We're not just scientifically interesting, you kind of like it here."

Carlos raised his head just enough to meet Cecil's eye "I like it BECAUSE it's scientifically interesting."

Cecil "hmmmed" and nodded a bit theatrically, in a universal gesture of "I don't believe even a tiny bit of what you just said" and Carlos made a disgusted sound and turned away in a gesture that was decidedly not pouting – because he was a grown-ass scientist.

Cecil laughed, and Carlos liked the sound of it so much he caught himself smiling into the crook of his arm. He made a mental note of that - and, he thought defiantly, he wasn't going to add any warning labels to it this time.

A scientist, he thought later, as walked out of the bar and onto the sand-blasted streets that led back to his lab, shouldn't jump to conclusions.

...

*Not that they were distinguishable from any of the bloodstains anyone ELSE's shoes had left when they'd come in the door. It was kind of part of the unique local ambiance for Night Vale bars.


	12. Chapter 12

_Author's Note: If you guys have been reading this, and you've made it this far, let me just say thanks._

_This is the final chapter. I have had a blast writing this, and sharing it with you guys. I've never finished a fic this long before, so it's been a real learning process. I really, really appreciate any thoughts or comments - let me know what you like, or didn't like!_

_And with that, let me take you now - to Carlos, bleeding on the floor of the bowling alley._

_..._

Carlos heard shouting, as though from off in the distance – heard somebody whooping happily, felt strong hands wrapping something tightly around his chest.

"Somebody call the station," he heard, and the voice sounded closer, "And let Cecil know he's gonna be …"

"Already on it" a woman's voice interrupted.

The man's voice was close to his ear now, muttering, "Poor bastard's probably going through hell in that booth…"

Carlos opened his eyes.

"Good morning, sunshine," Teddy Williams said. "Nope, don't try to sit up, you've been bleeding all over the linoleum. You're gonna be fine, but…"

"Teddy, we need you over here…like, NOW…"

"Just don't move, ok, big shot?"

Carlos didn't move. He took a slow, careful breath, felt the pull of something that had been torn open in the middle of his chest, held his breath for a moment, and exhaled. He turned his head to the side, where he saw Teddy and a small group of people huddled around a man lying, like him, sprawled out on the floor.

Carlos reached a shaky hand into the pocket of his lab coat for his cell phone, but his fingers encountered something foreign, metallic, still warm. He pulled out a watch, surprisingly light, it's dark metal now smeared with maroon blood; whether the blood was his, or the tracker's, or some combination of the two, he couldn't tell. He saw Teddy Williams, saw his strong hands go slack where they'd been staunching a wound in the tracker's abdomen, saw him look up at the NVCR station intern and shake his head.

And then he remembered.

This was his fault.

A flower in the desert.

He'd been warned.

What the HELL had he been thinking?

...

Carlos had known to find the Apache Tracker at the Desert Flower Bowling Alley and Arcade Fun Complex. Everyone in town knew, because he'd been hanging around pretty consistently, and Cecil had been venting his frustration about his unexplained presence there for the past few months on the radio every time he mentioned Teddy Williams and the citizen's militia.

"I took your advice" Carlos had said, the dusty wind catching his lab coat as he approached the rusted out Ford on which the other man was leaning. The Apache Tracker took a long, slow drag off of his clove cigarette, dropped it onto the gravel of the parking lot, and ground it out with his bare, callused foot before looking up, his expression blank.

"I checked the clocks." Carlos clarified. "I checked about 50 of them. All fake. Or …well, you know." The tracker nodded slowly.

Carlos squared his jaw, trying not to sound petulant. "So…any advice on how this new knowledge is supposed to help me, exactly?"

Carlos waited, but the tracker didn't move to add anything.

Carlos ran a hand aggressively through his hair.

Carlos was irritated, to put it mildly.

It wasn't really the other man's fault, he knew. Carlos was frustrated with himself for being led off on a wild goose chase by some culturally insensitive and possibly clinically insane layperson who'd wandered up to him in the middle of the desert and whispered a suggestion in his ear.

He'd spent MONTHS on the clocks, at this point, taking them apart, attempting to reconstruct them, calculating and recalculating and calibrating and using every tool at his disposal to try to make SOME kind of sense of how time was flowing here, but there was nothing. No rhyme or reason that he could find at all. And while he wasn't technically worse off than he'd been when he started, this new realization of just how bad the situation actually was had drained his final reserves of hope. Without time, there was no way to connect the data points, to make sense of this town - no way to publish anything even remotely credible.

He was a scientist – if he couldn't publish, couldn't validate his research, he…..he'd have to leave.

He felt his stomach clench, and crossed his arms defensively across his chest.

"Do you get what this means for me? What this could mean for my work here?" he asked. "Without a way to predict and calculate the flow of time, I lose almost every scientific tool I should have available. I mean, you understand the basics of relativity theory right?"

The tracker raised an eyebrow.* Carlos sighed and put a lot of effort into not rolling his eyes. He reached into his back pocket and began fiddling with his phone to pull up the translation app, but the tracker suddenly put up a hand to stop him.

Instead, the tracker slowly reached to his own wrist and unclasped the dark metal band of his wristwatch. Its surface caught the mid-day sunlight, and Carlos squinted against the blinding reflected light. He could see it more clearly now than he had the last time they'd met – it was sophisticated, with clean lines that reminded him of some of the university's more expensive particle physics equipment – and stood out in stark contrast to the grimy, callused hands of the tracker.

The other man reached out and pressed the watch into Carlos's hand. He clasped it tightly with both of this own, and looked into Carlos's eyes. His expression was dark, patient, solemn. He squeezed their hands  
together around the sharp edges of the watch, and nodded.

"Все будет хорошо." He said. "Вы увидите. Я даже не рассердился. Расскажите своим другом, чтобы перевести мои заявления в следующий раз.**"

Carlos pursed his lips, frustrated.

A loud shout erupted from the bowling alley, and Carlos looked away from the tracker's uncomfortably intense gaze. People had been trickling in slowly from the parking lot, carrying weapons ranging from shotguns to pitchforks to buckets of hot tar, which was standard for a meeting of Teddy William's little militia, but now the shouting was getting incrementally louder, and had been joined by a low rumbling sound.

By Carlos's estimation, the crowd inside the bowling alley was rapidly passing "unruly" and on their way to "warmongering" – Carlos had seen enough angry mobs in a year to know where this was all going.

The tracker looked pointedly at the bowling alley, then back an Carlos, and shrugged. He dropped his hands, leaving the watch pressed into Carlos's palm.

Carlos let out a huff of frustration. "Well, I guess somebody has to get to the bottom of this?" he growled. He couldn't help it. He seriously couldn't catch a break today. "And…I'm guessing that's going to have to be me?"

The apache tracker reached into the back pocket of his blue jeans, retrieved his lighter, and slowly began lighting another cigarette. Carlos shoved the watch into the pocket of his lab coat, turned sharply on his heel, and stalked off across the parking lot towards the bowling alley.

He WAS going to get to the bottom of this. Of this, and of the clocks, and of everything. Even if he was the only person in this damned town who seemed to think it mattered.

"Teddy Williams is deranged." he muttered under his breath.

...

Carlos sat up, slowly and carefully, cautious of the pinching in his side.

He looked around the bowling alley – at Teddy Williams, who had just finished bandaging his chest, at the station intern who had brought him a plastic bottle of water out of one of the vending machines, at the still form of the tracker - and wished he was better at saying thank you. At saying "I'm sorry."

He wanted to apologize. For underestimating the danger they were in. For needing to be rescued, at the cost of another man's life. For failing – with the clocks, the earthquakes, with everything. For misjudging this bizarre little town, and misunderstanding whatever role he was supposed to play in this misadventure.

He wanted to make excuses for himself, to ask for clarification, to find a way to make this right.

He wanted to let these people know…

He wanted…

He sighed.

He wanted to see Cecil.

He wanted to hear him laugh, to see him get riled up about the local mayoral candidates, to wax esoteric about the nature of nostalgia, to ask stupid questions about the moon. To shine a light onto this regret and shame and uncertainty, to be the one person, the one thing, who could make Carlos feel like he was doing something right, even if he didn't believe it right now.

A scientist doesn't fear the unknown, he reminded himself.

A scientist trusts the evidence.

A scientist runs into the fire.

His hand went to his phone.

...

Waiting outside the Arby's, Carlos watched the sun set.

He pulled the watch out of the lab coat, looked at the watch face for the first time, and understood.

Then he laughed, into the still, cooling air, for a long, long time.

...

He'd been wrong, he thought. About a lot of things. About everything.

And that was ok.

It was human nature – to push back against facts that don't seem to fit, to cling, desperately, to what you think you know. Nobody was immune to it – not even scientists. The theories and constants that have worked for you for so long, that you've relied on, like old friends – you don't retire them without a fight. And when something challenges them, when some new piece of information stubbornly refuses to fit – well, it's easy to feel threatened.

But past performance doesn't necessarily indicate future success. When a theory stopped being useful – you had to move on. You had to build a new one.

So. Time didn't work in Night Vale. And that was ok.

This town, these people, were not problems to be solved. Not data points to be brought in line. They were, in themselves, beautiful points of truth – and if Carlos had to rewrite every scientific theory he knew to accommodate them, so be it. He'd already rebuilt half his lab. What was reworking a few thousand years of scientific thought?

He was just going to have to start fresh. For Night Vale.

Just because something didn't follow the laws of physics didn't mean it wasn't worth protecting.

...

Carlos was watching the lights above the Arby's. Not cataloging their movements, not compartmentalizing them for later analysis, just – watching them. They glowed beautifully, bright pinpoints in the pink haze of the setting sun, with halos of blue green and lavender and gold, shimmering, twisting about each other lazily as though they were being drawn together, and pushed apart, and then spinning back towards each other. It was like watching a dance.

He heard the crunch of tires, saw this shadow stretch out in front of him and sweep across the asphalt as Cecil's car turned into the parking lot, saw it vanish as the sound of the engine died. Carlos turned, and saw Cecil step quickly from the car, his form tense. He took a few steps forward, then stopped, hesitating as though he stood on the edge of some invisible line in the asphalt.

"Carlos." He said, short of breath. "What is it, what's wrong? The show's almost over, but, there's still a little time if you need me too…um…"

Cecil's voice trailed off. He looked like he was going to tear himself apart trying to look serious and professional, but even in the dim light of the parking lot there was a tell-tale redness rimming his dry eyes, his brow creased with emotion. Carlos had heard the broadcast, anyway. Most of it. He knew Cecil had been crying.

Carlos shook his head.

"No,' he said. "It's nothing. After everything that happened, I just…well. I just wanted to see you."

Carlos dared to look up. Cecil was standing, stock still, as though frozen in place –his eyes wide, his flush so pronounced that Carlos could see it in the dim light. He made a small noise that sounded like "oh," and Carlos felt it shoot through his heart, felt a flood of fear and anticipation and affection, and he couldn't meet his eyes anymore.

He was brave, Carlos thought. To care about something in this town was dangerous. To care about something anywhere was dangerous, really, but here – the risk of loss was so high that it was nearly a certainty. Hope was something most people gave up, like a bad habit. Carlos had seen it, in the faces of the scientists when he'd first arrived, in the furtive glances of people on the street.

Cecil wasn't stupid. He knew the risks. He chose to care anyway. About Carlos. About Josie. About the interns, and the community calendar, and the damned mayorial elections. Maybe it was a little insane - it was definitely masochistic - but it was undeniably brave. Carlos was suddenly aware of how much he admired it, how much he had always admired it, without really understanding why.  
Cecil – brave Cecil - was here with him, had driven out when he called; hoping for something, expecting nothing, his heart in his hands, as always, on the off chance that he might be met with something other than Carlos's defensive, distanced "professionalism".

Of all of the anomalies he'd discovered in this town, Carlos thought, Cecil was by far his favorite.

"I used to think it was setting at the wrong time," he said, staring off into the distance, still unable to meet Cecil's eyes "but time doesn't work here, Cecil. Not like it works everywhere else, at least. I'm still working on it, but…." He stopped, started again, "What I mean is…sometimes things seem so strange, or malevolent, and then you find that, underneath, they're something else altogether. Something ….pure, and innocent."

Cecil said nothing for a moment.

Then Carlos heard light footsteps on the blacktop, felt the dip of the car hood as Cecil, quiet and careful, climbed up next to him. He was sitting, still, and close - close enough that Carlos could feel the warmth emanating from him, but consciously not touching. Never touching. The negative space between them vibrated with its own kind of intimacy, a potent mix of Cecil's hesitance and his anticipation, and Carlos felt himself drawn into it like light bending into the inescapable gravity of a black hole.

He was under no pressure, he knew. Not really. There was no rush. He could still easily back out of this. Make up something about the city, or the lights, tell Cecil he needed to go back to the station and send out an urgent message to the people of Night Vale about some random scientific paradox that would likely kill them all, and it wouldn't even rate on the list of things that people in Night Vale should be worried about but Cecil would do it. Faithfully, unquestioningly. Cecil would wait forever. But Carlos had nearly died today, and maybe he'd had enough of waiting and being cautious and careful when it came to this. Maybe you had to move fast in Night Vale. Maybe you always had to leap in, before you were ready – maybe you were never 100% sure of what you wanted before you went for it.

He reached out his hand, placed it on Cecil's knee, and it was done. There was nothing else to say.

He heard Cecil's small intake of breath, then his sigh, and then he felt the soft, warm weight of Cecil's cheek against his shoulder. Carlos felt something in him uncoil, and the nervous laugh that was forming in his chest melted into a sigh, and the next breath that he took of the cool, rich, Night Vale air felt like his first in months. He was finally breaking the surface, and he breathed deep, filling his lungs from a world that, for him, had just restarted.

His heart was betraying him, thundering in his chest; he could hear it pulsing in his ears, and he wondered if Cecil could feel it. He must. Carlos found he didn't care. Let him know. Carlos was done hiding it.  
Cecil's was careless with his own heart, shameless and indiscrete and unapologetic in his feelings. He wouldn't fault Carlos for this.

Carlos leaned into it. The void gaped around them, and Carlos didn't fight it.

"You've been looking out for me, haven't you?" Carlos asked, after a moment. "Since day one."

There was a pause, as though Cecil were considering it. "We all look out for each other here." Cecil said simply. Which was probably only half the truth. But Cecil meant it, he thought, and that was good enough.

"Yes. That was…something I didn't anticipate."

They stared out into the distance, watching the lights.

"Cecil?" Carlos asked, suddenly remembering something.

"Yes?" Cecil asked from his shoulder, his voice soft and velvety with contentment.

"Did you really get me a trophy?"

Cecil went rigid at his side. "Oh my god." he whispered.

"You seriously did, didn't you?" Carlos said, and he couldn't keep the smile out of his voice. "Did you bring it with you? Is it in the car?"

"Carlos, please…" he sounded mortified, and was burying his head farther into Carlos's shoulder.

"No, I really want to see it."

"It's a BIG DEAL, Carlos!"

Carlos laughed. He knew it was a big deal. He knew he probably hadn't been expected to survive his first year, that Cecil had probably feared the worst on every holiday, after every disaster. And he nearly hadn't made it. He'd nearly tripped at the finish line.

But Carlos couldn't bring himself to care about that now. Now he was here, he was alive, and Cecil was with him, horrified and ridiculous and earnest on the hood of his car, and Carlos couldn't help but laugh. Cecil gave his shoulder an indignant little nudge, somehow Carlos's arm ended up around Cecil's waist, and they were laughing together, watching the sky coming alive with stars.  
It was going to be another long year, Carlos thought. There was a lot of work he had to do, a lot of theories to reassess, a lot of constants to question. But laughing into the void, with Cecil at his side, he thought, there was something nice about not knowing.

...

*The tracker did understand basic relativity theory, of course. And some pretty advanced relativity theory – some of the bits Einstein never figured out. He just didn't like Carlos's sass.

**Everything will be fine. You'll see. I'm not even angry. Tell your boyfriend to translate my statement next time."


End file.
